Pages

3 Nov 2008

Rule of Representation

I have been doing some studying on the internet in my free time (not that I have too much of that nowadays) and I stumbled upon the Unix Philosophy. This is a philosophy, not method, for building programs and systems.As I went through the rules, I found something interesting. I'll paste it here:

Data is more tractable than program logic. It follows that where you see a choice between complexity in data structures and complexity in code, choose the former. More: in evolving a design, you should actively seek ways to shift complexity from code to data.

I have read in the past many articles about how data trumps programing algorithms in many cases and I know that Google uses this principle on their searches. Its just nice to see that its been thought about and discussed in the days of when Unix was thought of.